BocelliOnline

[Sally]

I just had to post this book on the site. It's by Shena Mackay and it's about a year in the life of a little English girl aged about seven or eight growing up in the fifties. It's not so much the actual story, it's the fact that it is EXACTLY like my life was, as I also grew up in the fifties. It really is a must-read for any other British woman of the same age. (I say British for I don't know what life was like for any other nationality.) Do you remember the excitement of having a new packet of multi-coloured plasticene at school, making coloured wool pom-poms on a string and having a little bottle of silver mercury balls to play with? (How dangerous, but we didn't know. I would never be allowed now.) This is a lovely, nostalgic book, and so poignant at the end, it really made me want to cry.

[La Donna e Mobile]

What's plasticene?
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"To sing, to sing, to sing......." (Andrea revealing his future plans to Classic fm)

[Sally]

I suppose you might call it modelling clay. It came in small, flat packets and inside were six rectangular strips of differently-coloured plasticene, long and flat with furrows in, like bright strips of ploughed field. I was so exciting to pull off pieces and roll them into tubes and balls on your desk lid (in fact, I think Andrea mentions moulding clay at school in his autobiography, so we must all have done it when we were young!) The teacher used to tell us not to mix the colours, but of course all we did, and ended up with dirty balls of brown and grey. You know, talking about it makes me want to go out and buy a packet.